Infomatters

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Hijacking conferences by any other name

In our field, the HICSS conference is rather well known, not least for its choice location (Hawaii) at a time of year (January) when most US folks want a break from the weather. I’m not a huge fan of the work there but some folks try to convince me it’s the real deal (usually the folks who go!). The acronym HICSS stands for Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. So successful is this conference that another has emerged, totally unrelated, also in Hawaii and also going by the acronym HICSS. Only this time, the SS stands for Social Sciences. Their call for papers is suitably all-embracing so that most disciplines could find a home here (and they organize island tours too!). It is not clear that any papers are reviewed which you think might put some providers of funding off the event but the conference certainly gets attendees.

The idea of two almost identically named conferences existing in the same location might be a coincidence but I don’t imagine so. The newer version makes little effort to disambiguate itself from the original and an email to the organizers just brought a curt reply that they were not in any way related to the original HICCS. They certainly don’t mention who the organizers or the reviewers might be either. Suspicious yet?

The emergence of bogus conferences has been documented in New Scientist and shows no signs of letting up. I heard colleagues mention it at the Council of Scientific Society Presidents’ meeting as a growing challenge in some fields. The most blatant efforts actually run shadow conferences at the same time or a week adjacent to the target conference, with a similar name, and lure people into believing it is a legitimate venue, charging them handsomely for attendance. Since many associations and hotels rely on the profit from conferences, you can see the challenge. You’d think scholars would not fall for it but then, how many folks opened that email call from the ‘other’ HICSS and thought a trip to Hawaii might be nice?

It’s not just conferences. I get an email every other day from some dubious publisher inviting my paper submissions. Follow the trail and you’ll find an editorial board of nobodies from far-flung universities that may or may not exist and then the real kicker, the page fees that you will be liable for when your paper is accepted (and it will be accepted). Open source publishing efforts have a real battle on their hands to demonstrate legitimacy and the frightening prospect of both the cowboy publishers and the traditional, conservative corporate publishers benefiting from this muddying of the waters is very real. Here’s another challenge for information science.

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Another iSchool formed

Another School of Information is being created, this one at Arizona. Not sure Allen has the best grasp of regional geography though 🙂

Leaders at the University of Arizona are trying to make one school out of two; the goal is to get students ready to fill jobs for all sorts of fields involving computers.

By merging two programs at U of A’s School of Information, the school would then become an iSchool. These type of schools are evolving from programs formerly focused on specific tracks such as information technology, library science, and information science.

Schools focus on educating students for a range of professions from web development to data analysis. Today A panel of deans from the top iSchools across the nation discussed the future for U of A.

Ken McAllister, the Planning director of U of A’s School of Information says, “Information is ubiquitous, there’s no job anywhere that doesn’t rely on information. Our goal is to train the next generation of scholars and workers.” Deans from other successful iSchools gave their input saying the University of Arizona is the perfect place for this to happen.

Allen Renear, Interim Dean of the University of Illinois says, “It’s a major research national research university, iSchools flourish as places just like University of Arizona. Right now, there are no iSchools in the Southwest. U of A is looking to be the first one here to join 53 other iSchools across the world.

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Down and out in Philly

ALISE 2014 promised a theme related to entrepreneurship in education, another hackneyed application of the term in university life. To this end, we were addressed by a keynote speaker who seemed to be selling Coursera as a solution to a problem some of us don’t have (imagine, they have now ‘discovered’ that students repeat-view the more difficult parts of a lesson!) and the E-word found itself in session titles throughout. The fact that people shoved papers into panel formats (or rather, ignored the panel format and proceeded to present disconnected talks in the form of papers) added to the sense that some conferences are really not quite what they should be. Only rarely did a critical voice raise itself to question the theme or its substantive absence in discussions. Sadly, most people I spoke with felt the same. The very dull Doubletree (perhaps the ugliest architecture in an otherwise attractive downtown) did not help.

The Deans and Directors Council was actually quite energized however, with a lively exchange aimed at pushing back on some of the accreditation nonsense regulations increasingly imposed on us. Here was a venue that actually felt like something constructive was happening and the group agreed to move forward on an action plan. Now that is educational entrepreneurship.

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Information as power zone in customer relations

We are reminded constantly of the power of interconnected tools to allow all of us to share information in real time, improving efficiency and enabling companies to connect with customers. In some ways this is undeniable but the ability to network also creates a new category of information, which when considered from a user’s perpsective, is partially useless, aggravating and even misleading.

UPS provide a great example of this at the moment. Currently struggling to move packages backlogged in Dallas (again) they provide numersous ways for customers to track and receive updates on the status of their items. Similarly, they usually allow sellers like Amazon to directly link into their tracking system so customers can access information at the point of purchase. So, no longer just waiting, shoppers can ostensibly track the progress of their packages acriss the country from source to destination. The trouble here is that UPS, once it has issued initial tracking info, does not actually update this information reliably and predictably, and makes it quite difficult to ask further questions.

Items backlogged this week are sitting in what UPS euphamistically term ‘exception’ status, and are tagged with the stock message that the anticipated delay is ‘one business day’. This day comes and goes and the update never changes. Some reports online indicated delays of more than 10 business days without this message ever being updated, and there is speculation that once in ‘exception’ status, your package is the lowest priority as the company tries to maintain its on-time record up with fresher shipments that have not yet hit a lag. UPS allows you to request updates but all this does (after asking for your email address again) is send you that same old message, nothing new. So yes, they provide online tracking but it is not real-time, not useful, and allows you little chance of estimating reliably when you may actually receive an item. One might consider this an information gap.

Of course, the beauty of the web is that one need not just accept this. The aptly named ‘pissed off consumer‘ contains numerous postings about the problems of UPS and their rather poor customer relations, including numbers to call. Some of the stories here are excrutiating. I tried contacting the company who sold me the item I am waiting for and they at least managed to get more info from UPS than I could. Most distressing for many online was that UPS knew days ago that anything entering the Dallas area was just going to pile up but they still accepted the orders, even with expedited shipping fees from late Xmas shoppers.This much one could determine with a little exploration online. Unfortunately, despite the supposed democratization of the web, too few sellers allow the buyer to choose preferred carriers, or else I suspect UPS would be in real difficulty in Texas and its serviced areas.

All this information power is potentially impressive for the companies perhaps but from a consumer side the black hole of holding patterns one ends up in quickly after the initial update is a guaranteed source of frustration. It may even be that the lack of tracking info from the start would be better than what is on offer here. Suddenly, the idea of network tracking seems less informative than it might be and the old power differential between informed and uninformed is magnified. Real world information and real world people seem mismatched. Unintended consequences of IT, again?

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Xmas Card as Information Object

The greeting card industry seems to have sustained itself despite the onslaught of digital alternatives, at least if my mailbox is anything to go by. Most schools and major units at my own university send cards out bearing seasonal salutations and best wishes for the new year etc. The card is more than symbolic, it actually is a revealing information object worthy of some analysis. Image choice is an obvious entry point. I prefer arty minimalism but I’m clearly in the minority. Gaudy colors and tired images of snow, bells, trees and landscapes abound. Tradition clearly lives and dominates the greeting card industry. Then there’s the group pics of the staff and faculty, the less said of which the better. IF you want to see what life is like in another unit, the group shot probably reveals more than the collective h-index.

Depressingly, many of these missives are unsigned. To me, this says a lot more than it should about the motives and genuine wishes of the senders, and you don’t need NSA clearance to read that signal. I mean, what is the point of sending an unsigned card to a supposed colleague? The lack of handwriting tells me the card was an afterthought, a rushed obligation handled by a staff member with a master list. You might think information professionals would be a little more aware of the signals they were sending but apparently not. And don’t get me started on the cost of all this symbolic signalling of goodwill. Am sure someone in a business suit has made the case for sending cards and produced a system for ensuring all contacts are included. So much for business analysis – the unsigned card is the biggest party-damper going. Bah humbug?

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CSSP: best content in a conference I’ve experienced

Despite the efforts of the winter weather and an over-complicated information system owned by American Airlines (which has little real information to offer), I managed to attend part of the Council of Scientific Societies Presidents meeting in DC this weekend. Session for session, there is more substance in this gathering than I’ve experienced at other conferences. Every speaker seems really top-notch and able to deliver deep content in a manner that truly spans disciplinary boundaries. Most enjoyable was Rob Dietz’s overview of the Center for the Study of Steady-State Economy’s work on assessing the real costs and values of our current use of the planet. He made a lot of sense, and made an even stronger impression when he revealed he believed so much in this approach to economic modeling that he had moved his whole family into a sustainable community housing arrangement in Oregon. Untitled 3-1 (dragged)

Among his many messages, I took away the argument that economic growth is a really inappropriate measure or goal for a nation to live by and that we need to rethink our collective sense of what is good for our societies, measure this appropriately, and then set policy. Of course, much of this also requires behavioral changes that perhaps economists are not best equipped to understand. More interdisciplinary challenges ahead.

Lots of other good stuff at CSSP, including a too-short but important committee discussion on the need (or not, as I argued) for longer moratorium periods for scholarly work in open access publication processes. I understand the realities of professional associations and their publication revenues, but we are entering an age where the ideas and requirements for access will so fundamentally shift scholarly practices that locking material down to protect the market for certain journals will no longer seem viable. It’s fair to say, I was in a minority on this one but the discussion was instructive.

While CSSP is really a closed shop, it is possible to represent your society there without being president. I suspect the small size and selectivity is not independent of the resulting high quality discourse, but what a shame more academic gatherings were no so stimulating.

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US scores below average in science and math, again

The release of the latest test results from the Program for International Student Assessment is big news overseas as most nations consider how well their teenagers are performing scholastically. The news has been a little quieter here in the US, perhaps because our 15 year olds perform below average on two of the three areas tested. You can get full coverage at the National Center for Education Statistics site where the measures, spread, and various percentages are cut open for examination but the big picture is not a very optimistic one. The Results by country or regional (some regions were assessed independently) ranking looks something like this:

1 Shanghai
2 Singapore
3 Hong Kong
4 Taiwan
5 S. Korea
6 Macau-China
7 Japan
8 Lichenstein
9 Switzerland
10 Netherlands
11 Estonia
12 Finland
13 Canada
14 Poland
15 Belgium
16 Germany
17 Vietnam
18 Austria
19 Australia
20 Ireland

As you can see, there’s a strong Asian, then European domination of the top 20, with Canada being the only country represented from the Americas. The US ranked 36th overall. Within the US, several states were assessed independently, with Florida scoring below average on 2/3 areas also though Mass did a little better. Just looking at OECD countries, the US ranked 26/34 on Math. Sobering, is how some are describing it. Or as one way on the Washington post comments section noted ‘at least we’re tops in football’….I’m fairly sure he did not mean soccer.

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ASIST really goes international

The first ASIST annual meeting under the new, non-national affiliation was held last week in beautiful Montreal and it was a raging success. Not only was the content much improved but the spirit of fun that emerged last year in hurricane-blasted Baltimore was sustained and enhanced. For me, the year was about internationalization and while the name change was important, the proof was in the attendance. By the start of the conference we knew 38 countries would be represented, a major increase over previous years, with attendees from as far away as Australia, Brazil, China, Ethiopia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Israel, Jamaica, Japan, Korea, Kuwait, Malaysia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, Taiwan, Trinidad and Tobago. We had 40 attendees from various European countries and 89 from Canada. It was a pleasure to meet so many and to turn the attendee numbers back up into positive territory after several years of decline (we passed the 600 mark once walk-in registrations were counted). Kudos to the program committee and to the local help provided by the School of Information Studies at McGill who put in a lot of effort here, culminating in a fabulous dinner celebrating CAIS and ASIST at the university’s Faculty Club on Tuesday evening. If anything, the program suggests we need to think again about adding in Wednesday to the conference program, there is just too much happening in the evenings to get to everything. Regardless, this was the best ASIST conference in years, and the stage is set to move further into international leadership in the years ahead.

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It’s not the medium….

The recent article in LJ about the real or imaginary differences between F2F and distance education was sparked by a survey of employers that suggested they prefer graduates from F2F programs. Cue an onslaught (well, at least a few) replies that spoke of the convenience of DE, how great their program is, and how there’s no real difference anyhow. I think this is the wrong argument. It’s not the medium it’s the message, or in this case, the content. Good programs are good programs. Poor programs are well….you get it. Sadly, there’s very little reliable information for those seeking guidance. I happen to think there’s a very real difference between the type of experiences you can get in a F2F program such as ours and one that lives entirely online. You just cannot replicate the interactivity, exposure and networking we provide in a purely digital program. But if you just want to talk classroom content, the goal, we hope, is to do a bit better than this:

Challinge

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Does every profession complain about its education?

As I work my way through the documentation and data gathering required for our accreditation review, I stumbled across a current article on the ‘crisis’ in legal education by Genevieve Blake Tung. She presents rather alarming data points for lawyers and law schools of which I was not aware. For example, employment rates for law graduates have been on the decline since 2008 and less then 66% of law school graduates obtain jobs requiring bar passage. Projected graduate supply outstrips likely demand by 3:2 and there are now extensive critiques of the problems with legal education and the disconnectedness between law schools and practice. Sound familiar? I don’t have any similar readings in medicine, social work, architecture or education but I wonder how hard it is to turn up equivalent expressions of disquiet in these professional domains? I suppose the better question is, was there ever a time when the professional community in any field deemed the educational preparation of its future members to be appropriate, affordable, and sufficient?